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Chest deep in Afghan quagmire

The Afghan war was a mistake from the beginning. Its justification was flawed, its intent confused, its implementation half-hearted.

That's why the bleak picture painted by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the man in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan should come as no surprise.

In a report made public this week, McChrystal articulated the obvious: Things are getting worse; the war is going nowhere.

Without a profound change in strategy and the deployment of a large but unspecified number of extra troops in the near future, he said, NATO risks losing.

But if ramping up NATO's commitment is a prerequisite, then the war is indeed lost. Public opinion in Europe has swung against the conflict. In Canada, there is no appetite for keeping troops in Afghanistan after Parliament's self-imposed 2011 deadline.

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Even the U.S., which initially welcomed U.S. President Barack Obama's pledge to prosecute the so-called "good war," is tiring of Afghanistan – to such an extent that the president appears reluctant to give his hand-picked general the extra troops he wants.

But then this was always an ill-starred conflict.

Portrayed initially as an act of self-defence against the 9/11 terrorists (none of whom were Afghan) it has succeeded only in exporting terror to Pakistan.

The original war aim was to capture Al Qaeda chieftain Osama bin Laden. Nothing less would do.

When in the weeks leading up to the 2001 invasion, Afghanistan's governing Taliban suggested that they would expel him to Pakistan in exchange for peace, their offer was peremptorily rejected.

Now, eight years and hundreds of deaths later, Bin Laden remains at large – apparently (and ironically) in Pakistan.

In the early days of the war, few questioned its need. Those who did, like former New Democratic Party leader Alexa McDonough, were roundly criticized as naive.

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When McDonough's successor, Jack Layton, suggested talking to the insurgents in order to win a negotiated peace, he was slammed as a Taliban toady.

How the world changes. Now Senate defence committee chair Colin Kenney, a longtime hawk, is calling not only for substantive negotiations with the Taliban but for Canada to disengage from a war that he says NATO can't win.

"What we hoped to accomplish in Afghanistan has proved to be impossible," he wrote in the Ottawa Citizen recently. "We are hurtling toward a Vietnam ending."

Kenny has been slammed as defeatist. But strangely enough, the more damning critique is McChrystal's.

Ostensibly, the U.S. general is more upbeat in that he suggests how the war could be won. But the conditions he lists as indispensable – including an end to Afghan government corruption – are almost impossible to meet.

In particular, he envisions NATO countries committing their troops to a long-term counter-insurgency struggle, where soldiers eschew the protection of body armour and fortified bases in order to live in and patrol isolated Afghan villages.

"(The NATO-led mission) cannot succeed if it is unwilling to share risk, at least equally, with the people," he writes.

He's right that this kind of Maoist approach is the only counter-insurgency strategy with a chance of success. But as Canadian Forces Capt. Trevor Greene found in 2006 when he took off his helmet in order to parley with the locals (an Afghan brained him with an axe), for the soldiers involved, it's also far riskier.

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